ENLIGHTENED TREATMENT

Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle |
December 10, 2005

DNA testing has changed the investigation and prosecution of sexual assault cases. The ability to match genetic material left by a rapist to a defendant with near-perfect accuracy has closed cases that years ago likely would have gone unsolved. The same science has freed wrongly convicted men after years of incarceration.

Rape prosecution has progressed in other ways as well. Last month, DNA allowed prosecutors to send a suspected serial rapist to prison for up to 46 years for a sexual assault committed 32 years ago. The case's unusual circumstances required New York Supreme Court Justice Bonnie Wittner to apply decades-old law in trying Fletcher Anderson Worrell, 58, for raping Kathleen Ham at knifepoint in her Manhattan, N.Y., apartment in 1973. After the trial ended, Wittner was quoted in the New York Times saying, "Thank God I'm a judge now" rather than three decades ago, when the archaic laws she had to use prevailed.

Then, a victim's testimony alone was insufficient to convict. In 1974, the year of Worrell's first trial, a victim needed a corroborating witness to back her up. That trial ended in a hung jury.

It also was common for defense attorneys to berate a victim or implicate her in her attack. Ham told the court that in her first trial, Worrell and his defense attorney, George C. Sena, "accused me of being his whore and said he [Worrell] was my pimp and said we tussled over money."

Ham, who was 26 at that time, said being "beat up on the stand" made her hesitant to testify again. She went forward after learning Worrell was wanted in 23 other rapes.

Thanks to the work of women's and victims' advocacy groups, attitudes about rape and its victims have changed for the better. It was once standard procedure for police to administer detector tests to rape victims, a hurdle not required of victims of other violent crimes. Nor are victims now asked about what they were wearing or to defend their presence at the scene of their assault.

Kelly Young of the Houston Area Women's Center agrees that the public is generally better informed these days about sexual violence, especially in cases of stranger rape. Police and prosecutors sometimes still ask victims why they were in a certain place, for instance, but it's typically more to understand circumstances than to cast blame — though it might still feel that way to the victim.

Worrell was at large because he jumped bail while awaiting retrial in Ham's case and in a separate rape that resulted in a conviction that was reversed on appeal. He was arrested last year in Georgia after he tried to buy a shotgun. A background check revealed the outstanding warrants.

DNA tests on bodily fluid left in a pair of Ham's underwear made clear at the recent trial that Worrell was Ham's attacker. This advance in forensic science has proved tremendously helpful in identifying assailants even when a victim does not get a good look at her attacker or when the victim is a small child. But the progress made by changing attitudes is just as significant, as Ham's case shows. The old way of trying rape cases, in which victims were blamed and held to higher standards of proof than in other sorts of cases, meant that some dangerous predators escaped justice and went on to harm new victims.